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Race-Mongering a Half-Century Later
Bob Weir / American Thinker
After reading about the gruesome murders of two New York City police officers, I was reminded of my early years as a cop.
On a cold, blustery night in February 1964, at the tender young age of 21, I walked my first “beat” as a rookie in a high-crime area of Brooklyn. After graduating from the four-month Police Academy course, I was assigned to the 79th Precinct in the middle of the predominantly African-American section known as Bedford/Stuyvesant. Officers Wenjian Liu and Rafael Ramos were murdered on the same street where I walked that first midnight-to-8 am tour of duty. Fresh out of the classrooms and exercise areas of the Academy, I was thrust into a world that no amount of academic training could prepare me for. I stood roll call with about 30 veteran cops in that old station house on Gates and Throop Avenues, as the duty sergeant performed a quick uniform inspection and told us to “be careful out there.”
So here I was, my first time in the official blue uniform, walking hurriedly toward Myrtle and Tompkins Avenue, where I’d be doing foot patrol under the elevated train structure on Myrtle, from Nostrand to Stuyvesant Avenues, for the next eight hours. My first introduction to this new world began about 3 am, when I was making another round trip from one end of my half-mile post to the other. Hands shoved deep in the pockets of my thick blue overcoat, I pushed against the icy wind and felt thankful for the wool sweater I had donned as extra padding under the knee-length garment.
About a block away, I could see what looked like a large bundle lying on the sidewalk, something that wasn’t there twenty minutes earlier, when I had made my last trek past that end of the street.
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